I'm not so sure. There were lots of bad posts in the past, as well. A lot of these perceptions boil down to sample bias (e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), plus nostalgia bias (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Then there is the question of macro trends in society at large, which no site can expect to be immune from (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). What does it all add up to? I don't know. It's a complex situation with more than enough datapoints to accommodate whatever pattern people want to project into it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).